But underneath all of this, I still believe there’s lots of room for local people to start taking personal pride and responsibility for the little urban rivers on their own doorsteps. Most towns were built where they are because of their streams and rivers, and everybody feels an instinctive connection with running water. Healthy, freely-flowing rivers bring a deep, subconscious level of meaning to the places where we live, and I speak from (nearly – how did that happen?) decades of experience when I rip off Kenneth Grahame to say that “there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in the river at the end of your road”.